Harvard has enough panegyrists without me.
— John Updike
I think books should have secrets, like people do.
I don't write about too many male businessmen, and I'm not apt to write about too many female businessmen.
My wife and I had children when we were children ourselves.
It is not an aesthetic misstep to make the viewer aware of the paint and the painter's hand. Such an empathetic awareness lies at the heart of aesthetic appreciation.
The writer must face the fact that ordinary lives are what most people live most of the time, and that the novel as a narration of the fantastic and the adventurous is really an escapist plot; that aesthetically, the ordinary, the banal, is what you must deal with.
John Barth, I think, was really a writer of my own age and somewhat of my own temperament, although his books are very different from mine, and he has been a spokesman for the very ambitious, long, rather academic novel. But I don't think that what he is saying, so far as I understand it, is so very different from what I'm saying.
There is a great deal of busywork to a writer's life, as to a professor's life, a great deal of work that matters only in that, if you don't do it, your desk becomes very full of papers. So, there is a lot of letter answering and a certain amount of speaking, though I try to keep that at a minimum.
The writers we tend to universally admire, like Beckett, or Kafka, or TS Eliot, are not very prolific.
I find in my own writing that only fiction - and rarely, a poem - fully tests me to the kind of limits of what I know and what I feel.
My interest generally is the hidden Americans; the ones who live far away from the headlines.
To be a human being is to be in a state of tension between your appetites and your dreams, and the social realities around you and your obligations to your fellow man.
I suppose sequels are inevitable for a writer of a certain age.
I think my first story sold for $550. This was in 1954, and it seemed like quite a lot of money, and I said to myself, 'Hey, I'm a professional writer now.'
Arabic is very twisting, very beautiful. The call to prayer is quite haunting; it almost makes you a believer on the spot.
A number of American colleges are willing to pay a tempting amount to pinch and poke an author for a day or two.
I was raised in the Depression, when there was a great sense of dog-eat-dog and people fighting over scraps.
Perhaps I have written fiction because everything unambiguously expressed seems somehow crass to me; and when the subject is myself, I want to jeer and weep.
In any interview, you do say more or less than you mean.
I would write ads for deodorants or labels for catsup bottles if I had to.
Toni Morrison has a habit, perhaps traceable to the pernicious influence of William Faulkner, of plunging into the narrative before the reader has a clue to what is going on.
We don't really want to think that the artist is only very skilled, that he has merely devoted his life to perfecting a certain set of intelligible skills.
Writing makes you more human.
Some stories or passages are more difficult and demand more fussing with than others, but, in general, I'm a two-draft writer rather than a six-draft writer, or whatever.
There's almost nothing worse to live with than a struggling artist.
I picked up 'On Moral Fiction' in the bookstore and looked up myself in the index, but I didn't read it through. I try not to read things that depress me.
In fiction, imaginary people become realer to us than any named celebrity glimpsed in a series of rumored events, whose causes and subtler ramifications must remain in the dark. An invented figure like Anna Karenina or Emma Bovary emerges fully into the light of understanding, which brings with it identification, sympathy and pity.
I never really made a choice to live in America, so I should be aware of the social strata outside of the ones that I may live in.
What interests me is why men think of women as witches. It's because they're so fascinating and exasperating, so other.
I still want to give my public, such as it is, a book a year.
I was trying to support a family with writing. I didn't have a private income. I had no other profession.
A lot of the Koran does not speak very eloquently to a Westerner. Much of it is either legalistic or opaquely poetic.
My actinic keratosis is a result of the triumphalism of the beach. The sun exacerbates it.
Customs and convictions change; respectable people are the last to know, or to admit, the change, and the ones most offended by fresh reflections of the facts in the mirror of art.
My life is, in a sense, trash. My life is only that of which the residue is my writing.
I seem most instinctively to believe in the human value of creative writing, whether in the form of verse or fiction, as a mode of truth-telling, self-expression and homage to the twin miracles of creation and consciousness.
The miracle of turning inklings into thoughts and thoughts into words and words into metal and print and ink never palls for me.
Humor is my default mode.
We are drawn to artists who tell us that art is difficult to do and takes a spiritual effort, because we are still puritan enough to respect a strenuous spiritual effort.
It is in middles that extremes clash, where ambiguity restlessly rules.
I should mention something that nobody ever thinks about, but proofreading takes a lot of time. After you write something, there are these proofs that keep coming, and there's this panicky feeling that 'This is me and I must make it better.'
In art, anything goes, and if it goes, it goes.
To guarantee the individual maximum freedom within a social frame of minimal laws ensures - if not happiness - its hopeful pursuit.
A person believes various things at various times, even on the same day.
I'm trying to get the terrorist out of the bugaboo category and into the category of a fellow human being.
When you sit at your desk, if you're lucky, there's a moment when you feel empowered to be someone or something else, to leap into another skin.
I know more about what it's like to be elderly and infirm and kind of stupid, the way you get forgetful, but on the other hand I'm a littler, wiser, dare we say? The word 'wisdom' has kind of faded out of our vocabulary, but yeah, I'm a little wiser.
I didn't need to write historical epics, no, or science fiction, though I read a lot of science fiction as a kid and rather liked it. But I didn't have the mentality.
The Internet doesn't like you to learn too much about explosives.
Reagan has turned America into a tax haven.
